Ever since people began reading books, very few innovative ideas have been offered to make the mechanics of the reading experience easier. For instance, most books still have to be held by both hands for stabilization purposes, and to prevent inadvertent flipping of pages.
Reading books with many pages has often caused readers to become not only arm weary, but sometimes have thoughts interrupted while flipping pages especially for elderly or disabled people who lack the manual dexterity to flip pages quickly. An ultimate reading experience would probably be one where book pages never had to be turned with your hands or fingers.
In more recent years, a whole new revolution in book reading has occurred. This has been made possible with the advent of what is commonly known as E-readers. These mobile devices are designed for the purpose of reading digitally formatted books and periodicals. A single E-book has enough memory to hold the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands of printed books with no additional weight or size. The E-book designs optimize book collection portability. Many E-book designs also contain special screens that optimize readability even in bright daylight.
Another advantage offered by E-readers over the old state of the art, is that of book page turning. A reader may turn a page by simply depressing a button on some E-reader models or touching a designated area of a touch screen on other models.
While there is no question that E-readers have greatly advanced the state of the art, they nevertheless have drawbacks, namely:
1) E-readers are designed to be cradled in one hand, with the other hand used for stabilization purposes as well as for pressing a button or tapping a touch screen to flip book pages. Anyone holding these E-readers, of not negligible weight, who is a serious reader will experience not only hand fatigue, but arm fatigue. This is the reason why E-reader manufacturers struggle to make E-reader devices even lighter in weight. This hand and arm fatigue deters from an enjoyable reading experience. Unfortunately, no two persons have the same size hands. Certainly a person with larger hands would feel more comfortable cradling an E-reader device than a child or elderly person, who may not be able to cradle the device in their hands, making their reading experiences much less enjoyable.
2) Another disadvantage of E-reader devices is that the page turning function requires the use of hands and fingers to blindly search out for the designated areas or buttons to turn the page. Not only is this annoying and tiresome to the reader, but it can result in false or inadvertent page turning.
3) A further disadvantage of E-reader devices is that many elderly people with neurological illnesses would find it difficult to avoid accidental page turnings.
4) For those readers using an E-reader with a touch screen, the repetitive finger screen contacts to flip pages will cause smudging and dirtying of the screen.
For this and other reasons, the subject invention is intended to mitigate some of the displeasures experienced by using an E-reader device.
The subject invention is an E-reader accessory device that allows a reader to turn pages on any E-reader such that the hands or fingers never touch the E-reader.